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Should parents be more permissive with misbehaving children?

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Below are some stories from Australia about the trend towards more permissive parenting.

An article from the Australian Courier-Mail on permissiveness at school.

Excerpt:

Brock Duchnicz will start year 5 at a new school this year unable to spell simple words like at, in or on.

In two years he has missed 63 days – almost 13 weeks – of school for offences such as swearing, class disruption and pushing chairs over.

His mother Sarndra said EQ’s policy of blocking her son from the classroom was not working.

Ms Duchnicz said teachers were not equipped to deal with children like Brock and called on the Government to introduce specialised behaviour management training for all teachers.

“I feel as though these kids are just pushed to the back of the classroom in the too hard basket,” she said.

“There are so many more children coming up the line like this and if they (teachers) are not equipped they need more understanding and time put into them.”

[…]Brock was recently diagnosed with ADHD but Ms Duchnicz stopped his Ritalin medication because it had no effect. She plans to have him reassessed.

Why does everything have to be the fault of society, or the fault of chemical imbalances? Why can’t people just be careful about making sure that their spouse is committed to raising the children to have certain moral values?

An article from Australian Herald Sun about discipline.

Excerpt:

A Melbourne expert says naughty corners and time out in bedrooms are inappropriate because they shame and humiliate.

The same goes for smacking, which education and parenting consultant Kathy Walker says makes children feel resentful.

[…]”Labels such as ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’ shame and humiliate children,” she said. “Even when this strategy is framed as a request for children to ‘sit and think about what they have done and then apologise’, it is inappropriate. A child’s bedroom should be a safe happy place of relaxation.”

Instead Ms Walker, who thinks smacking is unnecessary and ineffective, advocates “chilling out” where a child sits quietly “away from the scene of the crime” to calm down.

She said some parents spent too much time and energy forcing young children to say please, thank you and sorry, when their own behaviour was more important.

Why is it that so many people so uncomfortable with moral standards, moral judgments, and rewards and punishments? Can we expect to produce moral children when we banish morality from their development and focus on self-esteem and tolerance of bad behavior?

An article from the Australian Herald Sun on bullying.

Excerpt:

BULLIES would escape punishment under a new Victorian plan to reduce schoolyard intimidation.

Teachers have backed the idea but parents have raised concerns, saying bullies should face the consequences of their actions.

The Swedish-devised “method of shared concern” aims to “empower” bullies to change their behaviour.

[…]Rather than being accused, suspected bullies are merely spoken to and encouraged to think of ways to help a bullied student cope.

The hope is that an aggressor will be turned into a sympathetic ally.

“The approach is solution-focused,” a new government-commissioned report says.

“The emphasis is about bringing about desirable changes in participants rather than finding who’s to blame and applying sanctions.”

Victorian Education Union president Mary Bluett said the no-blame plan was in general a good “initial approach”, but the burden would rest on school staff.

It demonstrated why all schools needed trained counsellors, she said.

Why should adopt a policy based on “hope”? The article cites no research. Why believe that this permissive policy is good for children?

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